1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to psychiatric treatment of patients with phobias, and more particularly to a system for providing exposure therapy for psychiatric treatment of patients having various phobias.
2. Discussion of the Related Art
As is well known, people from all walks of life are known to suffer from a wide variety of phobias or related anxiety disorders. Simply defined, a phobia is an irrational fear of an object, activity, or situation that leads to a compelling desire to avoid it--e.g., fear of heights. Not only are there a wide variety of phobias, but any given type may manifest itself differently, or to a different degree, in different persons. Therefore, treatment programs are generally tailored individually to specific patients. Nevertheless, certain generalities in regard to treatment programs can be made.
Namely, exposure theory espouses the view that patients suffering from a particular phobia can be treated to successfully manage that phobia by repeated exposure to the particular situation. For example, patients suffering from acrophobia (fear of heights) may be treated by exposure to high places. Elevators, balconies, building windows, bridges, and airplanes are environments where a patient being treated for acrophobia may be deployed. Although the degree of success varies from patient to patient, exposure therapy has been proven effective in many cases and controlled studies.
A more particular derivation of exposure therapy is referred to as "graded exposure therapy", whereby a patient is exposed to particular situations in gradations of gradual but increasing severity. For example, an acrophobic patient may be treated by leading the person to a first floor balcony. While the initial deployment may result in relatively high levels of anxiety, it has been found that the anxiety level will typically subside after a patient has spent some period of time in the environment. Therefore, after the patient has spent some time on the first floor balcony, and has reached some level of comfort in that position, he may then be led to a second floor balcony, and so on. In this way, the patient may be continually moved to higher and higher elevations, allowing the anxiety level to subside at each level before continuing. Repeated sessions of treatment in this manner (i.e., graded exposure) have been found to successfully help patients in facing and managing phobias. It is, moreover, desired to vary the treatment environment. In one session, a patient may be gradually led to successive balcony floors as described above. In a subsequent session, that same patient may be led up multiple flights of stairs, elevated up several floors in an elevator, or exposed to some other environment.
Typically, there are two categories or methods by which exposure therapy is practiced in vivo and imaginal. Pursuant to the in vivo (i.e., "real life") approach, patients are exposed to real situations and stimuli. In contrast, the imaginal method is practiced by having patients imagine particular situations or scenarios. For example, in a treatment method known as systematic desensitization, a patient is instructed to relax, then imagine a stimuli for a situation that causes anxiety, relax again, then stop imagining. These steps are repeated and as the levels of patient anxiety begin to subside, the patient is asked to imagine a different scenario that provokes higher levels of anxiety.
While both in vivo and imaginal therapy has proven effective for treating different patients, both are characterized by various shortcomings. Notably, in vivo treatment is typically time consuming and therefore costly. In this approach, the patient must be taken from the therapist's office and deployed in real life settings, which excessively consumes the therapist's time and is therefore costly. In addition, subjecting the patient to situations outside the office (e.g., public places) compromises the doctor patient confidentiality and may be embarrassing for the patient. As a result, many patients are unwilling to undergo such therapy and go untreated. Moreover, in certain treatment environments such as an elevator or an airplane, the environment is not under patient or therapist control, often resulting in excessive levels of anxiety on the part of the patient, which may be counter-productive for the therapy.
Likewise, the imaginal method of treatment suffers from shortcomings of its own. Most notably, this method has proven to be largely ineffective for patients with very poor imaginations. Like the in vivo method, the imaginal method is often time consuming and expensive, as it may take excessive amounts of time for the patients to imagine scenarios to adequately invoke episodes of anxiety for proper treatment. In addition, patients may find it often difficult to sustain the imagined scenario once high levels of anxiety have set in.
Although the specific examples set forth above detail scenarios and environments for treating acrophobic patients, it is appreciated that exposure therapy has been widely used in a variety of phobias and anxiety disorders.